Rubber Band Sounds Lab

Jan Marek and Adrian Tanner

7A

Due: 14/3/11

Rubber Band Sounds

I.  GUIDING QUESTION: How are the sounds that vibrating rubber brands produce effected by their width, their stretch, their length and how far out they are stretched?


II. HYPOTHESIS:
I think that the more the thinner, more stretched, shorter, or more stretched out to the side a rubber band is, the higher it will sound.


III.  Exploration (PLAN & DO A TEST):

Materials:

• Thin Rubber Band

• Thick Rubber Band

Procedure:

1. Stretch out a rubber band.
2. Pull and let go off the rubber band, leaving it to vibrate
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 using different amounts of stretching, stretching to to the side, or change the length or width of the rubber band.

                                               


IV.  RECORD & ANALYZE:

Amount of Side-Stretch	Observations
1 centimeter	low, almost no sound
2 centimeters	sound is higher and longer than with 1cm
3 centimeters	sound is higher and longer than with 2cm
4 centimeters	sound is higher and longer than with 3cm
5 centimeters	sound is higher and longer than with 4cm

Amount of Length-Stretch	Observations
Low	a very low, unclear sound
High	a rather high pitch, slightly unclear sound

Thickness of Rubber Band	Obervations
Thick	a very low, very unclear sound
Thin	a relatively low, unclear sound

Length of Rubber Band	Observations
Short	a rather high pitch, clear sound
Medium	a lower pitch and more unclear than the “Short” one
Long	the lowest pitch and unclearest sound of the three

V.  Concept Acquisition (CONCLUSION):  
Our Guiding Question was “How are the sounds that vibrating rubber brands produce effected by their width, their stretch, their length and how far out they are stretched?”. To this I answered, “I think that the more the thinner, more stretched, shorter, or more stretched out to the side a rubber band is, the higher it will sound.” I believe that my hypothesis was right as our results clearly show answers that match my expectations. This is probably because when the waves travel through a looser or shorter rubber bands, their frequency and therefore even their “pitch” lowers. For the side stretching part, I believe that we acquired our answers thanks to the larger stretch increasing the amplitude of the waves and therefore making the sound more audible.


VI.  Concept Application (FURTHER INQUIRY):
The stretching of the rubber bands was done by hand so we cannot rely on its accuracy. If we used something more accurate than human labour, we could get more accurate results. I still believe that the general results would remain the same. Also, we could do tests with material other than rubber bands to see if the results would remain the same or if they would change with the change of material. Overall I think that this was a “simple” lab and the general idea seems to be more important than exact results. For exact results, the tests would have to have been conducted differently.